Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge: Nearly a third of internal storage taken by system

An SD card may now be a necessity for the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 EdgeSamsung

Of the announced 32GB internal storage inside the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, a whopping 8GB of it will be taken up as soon as you take the device out of the box, according to a hands-on report. However, potential Galaxy S7 buyers with large music and video collections will rejoice at the return of an expandable SD card slot, a feature sorely missed from the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge.

But the revelation that the device will only have an alleged 24GB left to store apps on the main storage will leave others bemoaning the lack of storage compared to rival phones.

While the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge both came in the larger 64GB and 128GB varieties, the S7 sticks to 32GB as standard, although the fact that you can move certain apps to an SD card (up to 200GB) might alleviate the pain slightly.

While the exact details of what is taking up so much storage on the internal partition is mostly hidden away behind the phone's UI, the blame likely falls on Samsung's custom TouchWiz interface that overlays the Android operating system.

What the latest S model promisesYouTube/Samsung Mobile

The DroidLife report also notes that the S7 and S7 Edge both do not support adoptable storage, a new feature for Android Marshmallow (from version 6.0) that gives users the option of adopting external storage as part of the internal allowance. This feature encrypts and formats the storage media to function with only a single specific device.

Considering I personally have taken up 17GB of internal storage on my current Android device, the 24GB limit on the Galaxy S7 is not an insignificant shortfall on the otherwise rather exciting flagship smartphone from the South Korean company.